Chinese share bribe stories on web

Several Chinese websites have sprung up in the past week on which citizens confess to buying out officials, inspired by an Indian anti-corruption site called "I Paid A Bribe", state media said Tuesday. At least eight similar Chinese sites have been launched since Friday, the state-run China Daily reported. The sites, which aim to highlight the daily toll of corruption, invite Internet users to describe the bribes they paid and the circumstances but asks them to refrain from identifying the officials involved. "We reveal bribery but object to infringement of privacy," Zhang Zhongguo, an employee with a Beijing-based Internet company that set up a site called "I made a bribe", was quoted as telling the China Daily. The site attracted 60,000 visitors in its first three days. In one post, a user described giving a judge a gift certificate to obtain a ruling in his favour while another person said they gave a traffic police officer a carton of cigarettes to reduce an overloading fine, the report said. The operators of confess-a-bribe sites acknowledged they were unable to confirm whether all posts were true and were careful to delete those that risked defaming specific individuals. "I can't rule out that some posts could be unfounded and I don't have any means to verify them," Sun Bailing, who started operating another site last week in Hanshan in the eastern province of Anhui, told the China Daily. The Ministry of Supervision, the government's discipline watchdog, confirmed to the newspaper it was aware of the new websites but declined comment. India's ipaidabribe.com was started last year by the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, a non-profit organisation based in Bangalore with the aim of tackling corruption.